We have a seen a number of people in the influencer recently taking jobs at vendors.

Keith Townsend is the latest and I wish him the very best.

I'm not saying if you participate in @TechFieldDay you'll find a new job. But the correlation between the number of TFD delegates starting new jobs in the past month can't be a fluke. You want to know what it takes to be a delegate? DM me. I'll help or give as much advice I can.

More Influencers

Participating on social media, building a public profile and becoming an ‘influencer’ is mega-fun and deeply rewarding at a personal level. Travelling around to big events, getting the latest information is much more fun than slugging it out in the trench warfare of Enterprise IT vs ITIL.

For most people, the energy needed to keep posting content while working and, you know, life is a serious effort. Writing blog posts on a regular basis take time, confidence and effort.

The time and ‘life energy’ that you put into a being an influencer can improve your career. Recruiters exist to find people like you, when employers can find you without the middle man you win. Social Media has a its problem but it can be a new pathway to career advancement, offer you new choices.

And you will learn a heck of a lot. If nothing else, you can take your improved communication skills, the new knowledge and insights back to your old job and maybe just enjoy that a little bit more.

The Good News

Anyone can become an influencer. You don’t need permission to start writing that blog. It can cost nothing with free hosting on WordPress. Start simple, practice the process, learn from the experience, adapt as needed and publish. Keep publishing and it won’t take long for people to notice you.

Does this mean Apple will delay the next generation of MacBooks even further ?

Overall, Intel had a stellar quarter, but it originally promised that it would deliver the 10nm process back in 2015. After several delays, the company assured that it would deliver 10nm processors to market in 2017. That was further refined to the second half of this year.

On the earnings call today, Intel announced that it had delayed high-volume 10nm production to an unspecified time in 2019. Meanwhile, its competitors, like TSMC, are beginning high volume manufacturing of 7nm alternatives.

I’m not an expert but Apple has aligned its MacBook release plans to Intel CPUs. Previous product lines have been delayed when Intel is unable to deliver on the schedule that it commits to. On the basis that Apple performs a substantial amout of the customisation to the motherboard for its laptops to improve power and add its own custom silicon, a correlation between Intel CPU failures and Apple product releases would be synchronised.

I’m ‘sads’ because I’m ready for new MacBooks but the current generation suck badly and I would rather not buy the crippled products on offer today. I need ports – USB A & C plus SD-Card slots are the minimum. Preferably a HDMI port too.

Apple has pulled off a marketing coup here. Its managed to increase the perceived price point of an Apple phone by around 30% ( from $700 to $1000) without upsetting customers. The key point of the iPhone 8 is to appear to offer a product at the same price $700 point while moving a large percentage of the customer base to higher selling price.

“We can see from the initial response, customer demand is off the charts,” an Apple spokeswoman told Reuters.

When you got it, you got it. Apple is making money out of features that no one needs, or wanted in the iPhoneX. But they are willing to pay for it. For the haters, you can buy the iPhone8 and gloat about how good you feel that you bought the cheaper phone. For the lovers, you can join the queue for the iPhoneX because that makes you happy.

As an executive once told me, “sure, its stupid to buy this product but if customers are buying it I’m going to sell it to them”

After listening to the show, I am worried I have made a poor choice to start my career. I began to study the CCNA. As professionals in the networking field, please could you provide advice on a networking certificate that will give me a leg up.

While studying at university, Cisco was God in the networking program. I have never used an alternative company.

In terms of first steps towards an IT career, you are on the right path for now and in the current climate. The CCNA program will give you a good grounding in some basics and prepare you for long term career.

Today Cisco remains the ‘big dog’ in data networking and you are much more likely to get your first few jobs with a Cisco certification on your resume. So I feel you are making the right choice right now. In the years ahead, I doubt that Cisco certifications will be as dominant.

One significant factor is cost – its very expensive. You definitely need to consider whether you will get a return on time and money spent. As Cisco Learning continues to increase charges for courses, exams and study material there is less chance that you will make a career break to pay off that money.

FWIW, I have abandoned my own Cisco certifications so I can spend time on new skills like GCP/AWS, Linux and programming. I can always re-learn the old networking if I need it again. And the new stuff from vendors isn’t much different so there isn’t a big learning curve for me.

My advice is that you should learn as much as possible whenever you can. It is a certainty that you will be learning new technology for the rest of your career. Your CCNA is just first step on that path and you will have many more things to learn in the future, the majority of them will not have a curriculum and test.

For example, learning Linux is not taught in 40 hours of classroom time and some extra hours of self-study. With some good learning around fundamentals, you can easily learn Palo Alto or Fortinet firewalls.

In terms of University education that you highlight, Cisco has spent large sums to provide course resources for teachers and institutions. This saves money and makes it easy for them to deliver a course with recognised source. Of course, Cisco gets a bunch of graduates who will be keen to use what they have learned which is good for selling more Cisco products (in psychology terms its called exposure bias, you like what you know).

At the same time, the market is changing and Cisco isn’t growing or changing with it. There is public cloud networking like AWS/GCP/Azure, there is security and monitoring where Cisco is not a leader as a couple of examples. Thats not a negative, its a reality and Cisco has to keep selling legacy technology to keep the money rolling in.

So my advice is to keep an eye on what is happening in the market and adapt your career, change direction as needed.

What Matters

If you are surrounded by Cisco technologies and career choices based on Cisco, then go with it. Cisco is successful company and has large footprint in the Enterprise and you could have a strong career just following that path for many years. But be wise and evaluate your choices on a regular basis. Don’t overcommit to anything in your technical life – you don’t want bet your house payments on be the worlds best spanning tree person when people are moving into the public cloud.

Remember: The goal is to earn money so that you can live your life. It doesn’t really matter which brand of technology you are using, it is networking that will keep you employed for several decades. Its high likely that you will change employers every few years. Your skills must be portable to make the transition regularly.